Sunday, December 11, 2005
It never pays to be macho and think that the elements can't get to you just because you're guzzling multi-vitamins. Us Karachi vaalas simply cannot deal with temperature change and so, have been fighting the flu for a week. To make matters worse, I was forced (I swear) into eating a big Mac and somehow, my stomach found out how my head and heart feels about McDonalds (basically, that it's amongst the nastiest corporations on earth and should be exterminated with immediate effect), and I threw up violently, after which my tummy has been dodgy for days.Attended the Beaconhouse Conference in Karachi and was on one of the panels. Shireen Naqvi asked me about one of my favourite topics: Competition. I had about 2.5 minutes to talk and spoke about how competition creates angst and why cooperation is a far better approach, m.e.g.a. (mutually exclusive goal attainment), the role of parents in creating little monsters, the Karachi Grammar School -> Harvard -> Citibank cycle of life, the need for creating supportive environments where everyone succeeds, and the misguided notion that competition is an inherent, human condition. Pro-social behaviour is consistently observed in toddlers and infants, who share toys and take turns in the playground so that lays to rest the idea that human beings are born with a competitive streak. More on this later ...
I am a big fan of Six Apart, founded by the husband and wife team of Ben and Mena Trott. Their company develops the way-cool publishing platform, Movable Type and they also do TypePad and LiveJournal. Anyway, a while back, they had some server troubles and customers faced difficulties in publishing their blogs. Here is how Six Apart dealt with the problem:
Customer service on high-intensity steroids! Now if only Mobilink could learn from this and actually do something tangible about its core offering, i.e. providing cellular services to customers, instead of palming off last year's stock of Blackberrys to wannabe business folk, life would get a whole lot better.
I met someone last night who was admiring the Indian kurta I was wearing. I promptly started raving about one of my favorite Indian retail outlets, FabIndia, and she said, oh, the next time you send for things from there, get me a few blah blah whatevers. So I said, well, you should go yourself and check out the place. She said, array bhai, never. There are too many Hindus in India and I can't deal with them. There are a few living in my apartment block and I tell you, it's such a problem. What if they touch your clothes or come into direct contact with you? Naheen, naheen, I really can't cope with them. Ok, I know that there are people like this in the world. However, it is absolutely traumatic to come into contact with them. I moved away from her, frothing at the mouth, but uncharacteristically, said nothing. The least I should have done was to ask her how her ridiculous morality, or whatever it is that gets these people's groove on, permits her to consider using products produced by Hindus. Anyway, she is not welcome in my house, EVER.
AAAAAARGH. Am too livid to think coherently any more.
3 Comments:
The concept of human beings intrinsically competitive and there is nothing we can do about it, also enrages me. In some ways i DO feel that we are born competitive, but we are also born a lot of other things that we try to curb and control, that's what living in a human society means. How come the same argument is not given for sexually promiscous behaviour (at least not in our part of the world) etc, etc.
Whether we like it or not, its survival of the fittest. We're all out there for a piece of the same pie. I learnt that the hard way at work.
But what we can do is temper our competitiveness with compassion and empathy. There are a lot of other base instincts that we've suppressed as we evolved through time.
Ughhhh, that monster ... re, the hindu blurb.
It's great that people are at least talking about competition and not taking it for granted as a natural state of existence. I think though, that the pie is big enough for everyone. Human beings are greedy - nothing is ever enough and that's when things start getting messy. The constant demand for growth and the desire for profits above all else is what creates the nastiest form of competition and also results in massive disasters like Enron and Global Crossing. There are numerous other white collar criminal bastards who should be in jail. There is a great need also for examing Wall Street and the nightmarish pressure it exerts on companies to perform and deliver results. Profit and growth occurs in the name of stockholders not stakeholders. Creating unfair advantage over those who are less powerful is not what survival of the fittest is about.
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